Review, Cage & Rilke

 I

REVIEW
 ===============================
 
Rudolff Laban
 
Space (level, directions, focus, pathways), breath, kinesphere, cube, 6 components of human movement with their respective elements.
 
Question 1

How did the exploration of these elements of movement  affect your expressive capacities?

*
 
Extra-Daily Techniques (Eugene Barba) 

Balance and Off Balance 

Question 2

Why is it important for the performer to engage in the practice of extra-daily techniques?

*
 
Isadora Duncan Inspired Arms
 
Arm movement with scarfs (Laban's Free Flow)
 
Solar Plexus
 
Question 3
 
Based on your own experience, how would you make sense of the connection between your solar plexus and your arm movement?
 
------------------------------ 
 
Maria Callas
 
About the music: Find the justification (depth) of music, (when you want find a gesture, listen to the music with your soul and ears, also the mind, the composer has already laid it down for you),  the singer becomes the most important instrument of the orchestra (prima donna or primo uomo), the singer is in service of the music, it is all one reflex.

Question 4

What do you think Callas meant when she said to "listen to the music with your soul"?

 *
 
About the opera work: Once you read it and accept the role, read it again (the score), act by act, ask what is she/he; does the character agree with the music? Make them agree if they don't. Learn it [as the composer wrote it, (what Callas calls "straitjacketing"). Then, the conductor gives his cuts, possibilities and cadences (built according to the making of the composer)]. Then, go home & speak it to yourself (in Italian opera it is always in a flowing movement). Leave it; retake it; work with the accompanist, (first piano rehearsal with cast and conductor), attend reading with the orchestra, staging [full voice (with cast, chorus and orchestra)], costuming, rehearsal with full voice, first dress rehearsal, second dress rehearsal.
 
Question 5

What did Callas mean when she said "speak it [the role] to yourself."

*
 
About character work: study libretto, find truth in the music, study the role (coloring of the voice, movement [minimal and credible] costume), try to feel what the composer wanted, dual mind (the performer's mind and the observer's), breathing in function of talking in music form (or singing), music as an instrument of theater, the opera actors keeps the poetry, the mysticism working, deep & honest feeling is and will always be real.

Question 6

What do you interpret by mysticism within the performing arts context?

 ------------------------------------
 
Sara Bernhardt
 
Posing with artistry [...] like living poetry. Playing archetypes. Traditional makeup, Symbolic Style, anti-emotionalism.
She followed Goethe's Rules of Actors  (1803)
Handbook for Theatrical Poses by Alamanno Morelli (1854)
 
Eleonora Duse 
 
Uncanny control of her instrument through natural choices.
Unaware of the audience, channeling of spirit archetypes, dissolving the ego through possession (what she called "The Grace"). No makeup, emotionalism or realism, Quintilian's ideas about acting, leading to Stanislavsky's method.

Question 7

Establish a comparison between the acting method used by Bernhardt and Duse? 

---------------------------
Regino Pedroso  
(Cuban-Chinese poet)
 
Pedroso defines poetry in the East as an "emotional way of feeling and seeing life," as opposed to the literary virtuosity with which poetry is addressed in the West.
 
Question 8
 
How does this statement by Pedroso helps us tackle the lyrics of arias beyond their musical aspect?
 
 
 
Sources:
Chinesism and the commodification of Chinese Cuban culture 
 http://ignaciolopezcalvo.blogspot.com/2008/11/chinesism-and-commodification-of.html
 
 Regino Pedroso: The Human Face of the Social
 https://www.angelfire.com/planet/islas/English/v2n7-pdf/57.pdf
 
 
 --------------------- 
 
Gustavo Matamoros 
(Local Sound artist)
 
Sound as raw matter for the creation of art.

 From a critical-listening point of view, "to listen for" means "to hone down the very voice you are choosing to listen to by putting away the rest of the sounds" and "to listen to" means to listen to all the sounds as a way of discovery."

Seeing music as sound is the same as saying that music is a description of the world in motion.
 
Interview
 
 Gustavo Matamoros WLRN
Source: https://www.wlrn.org/tags/gustavo-matamoros
 
Question 9
 
How does the distinction made by Matamoros between "to listen for" and "to listen to" helps us understand the nature of vocal and instrumental sound?
 
 

================================
 

 
II
 
NEW CONTENT
 
Detail in Movement: Pause and Connection

John Cage

(min 0:00 - 11:00)

"The pause provides some room for the experiencing of the divine."
 
 Question 10
 
After reading the quote above, what do you think John Cage meant?
 
------------

Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower" by Rainer Maria Rilke, 

A Poetry Film by Matt Huynh & Mila Nery

 

Letter 3. Rainer Maria Rilke

https://rilkepoetry.com/letters-to-a-young-poet/letter-three/

 

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so little as criticism. Only love can grasp them and keep hold of them and be just to them. Always trust yourself and your own feelings as opposed to any such analysis, review or introduction; if you should be wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and in time to new realizations. Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which like all progress must come from deep within you and cannot be forced or hastened by anything. The whole thing is to carry the full time and then give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by your own intelligence, and to await the hour of the delivery of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an artistic life, in understanding, as in creating.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke 
 
Question 11
 
After reading the paragraph above, choose one advise given by Rilke that you feel applies to you?


 

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